Fun With Acronyms / Real Life

• The exciting render engine of the software suite Blender (version 2.8 onward) was nicknamed Eevee, which may or may not have been inspired by that renowned Pokémon, and which was jokingly justified as standing for "Extra Easy Virtual Environment Engine".
• In the UK, an executive branch of the department of Health, the "National Institute of Health and Care Excellence", elected to forgo the logical contraction, drop the H, and decided on NICE.
• The George W. Bush administration originally referred to the 2003 Iraq War military operation as “Operation Iraqi Liberation,” but after recognizing the implications of this name (that is, playing into the assumptions of many people that the war was in order to gain control of Iraqi oil reserves), changed the name to “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
• The super PAC “Carly for America,” which supported Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign, was forced to change its name, since super PAC's are not legally allowed to reference a candidate. So the PAC changed its name to “Conservative, Authentic, Responsive Leadership for You and for America.”
• Latin American political parties seem particularly fond of this. As one example, Bolivia's current governing party is MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo), with mas in Spanish meaning "more"^note To be precise, "more" in Spanish is written "más", with an accent on the "a". Multiple parties in South American countries have succeeded in constructing names that produce the acronym PODEMOS, translating to "We can".
• Superbly trolled with by Democratic Party in June, 2017. Two weeks after Donald Trump sent the viral tweet with the text "Despite the constant negative press covfefe"^note he probably meant "coverage", Democratic Representative Mike Quigley filed legislation titled the Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement (COVFEFE) Act. The bill would amend the Presidential Records Act to cover social media, thus requiring tweets and other social media posts by the U.S. President to be preserved under law.
• Before 1999, France's Commando Parachute Group was known in French as Commandos de Recherche et d'Action en Profondeur, and yes, that was the actual acronym. Meaningless in French, but hilarious in English.
• There is a certain French Connection shop at Heathrow Airport, which has its email address written in big block letters: FC.UK
  • French Connection lives and breathes entirely on this trope. Christmas campaign? 'fcuk christmas'. Denim range? 'fcuk denim'. It's clearly the best thing about the shop.
  • In 1999, French Connection sued Conservative Future UK for rebranding themselves CFUK, claiming a trademark on the letters FCUK "in any order..."
  • This was in fact French Connection's whole advertising identity, even outside the United Kingdom, for several years in 2000s.
  • It's worldwide. A shop with the large sign reading FCUK exists within a prestigious shopping complex in Malaysia.
• The MicroSoft Critical Update Notification Tool. Type it out.
• SCRAM - Safety Control Rod Axe-Man - an emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor (and is precisely what you'd want to do in the event of a meltdown).
  • The acronym goes back to (or at least references) the first nuclear reactor ever built, CP-1. One of the safety measures on this crude early reactor was an additional emergency control rod, held up by a rope. There would be a man stationed next to the reactor with an axe, whose job was to chop through the rope in the event of an emergency, causing the rod to fall and halt the reaction.
  • The nuclear industry loves giving reactor designs acronym names. The Canadian nuclear industry's reactor uses heavy-water (in which ordinary hydrogen's heavier isotope Deuterium replaces said "ordinary" hydrogen) as its neutron moderator, allowing it to run on natural (read: un-enriched) uranium, thus giving their reactor design the name Canada Deuterium Uranium spelling CANDU. (It helps that because of how light hydrogen is, the neutron doubles deuterium's mass which actually does appreciably change chemistry, so Deuterium is one of only two isotopes to have a distinct chemical symbol from its element's most prevalent isotope, the other being Tritium, which is also a hydrogen isotope. Deuterium's symbol is D, and Tritium's symbol is T)
    • Also from Canada, the Multipurpose Applied Physics Lattice Experiment reactor design is, to this day, one of the most popular reactors worldwide for use in the production of radio-isotopes that are used almost exclusively for medical applications. Conveniently its initials spell out the name of Canada's official national tree.
    • Again from Canada, Tri University Meson Facility is the national accelerator laboratory for nuclear and particle physics, hosting the world's biggest cyclotron (accelerating 520MeV particles). Based in Vancouver, it was originally named for its three founding universities (SFU, UBC, and UVIC), but it is now a collaborative project between 19 universities.
    • One predecessor to the CANDU was SLOWPOKE, which stood for Safe, Low-Power Kritical Experiment.
    • Before even SLOWPOKE, there was the first ever nuclear reactor to activate outside the United States, Canada's Zero Energy Experimental Pile (it had more than zero energy but none of it was actually harnessed meaningfully).
    • Meanwhile, in the 'States, one Department of Energy design developed in the Argonne Nat'l Lab in Chicago was the ARGONAUT, or Argonne Nuclear Assembly for University Training.
    • At one point, the US had a nuclear lab on the island of Puerto Rico, where scientests developed the Boiling Nuclear Superheater.
    • NASA actually led some research into devising nuclear-fission reactors that could provide an energy-supply for unmanned spacecraft in the Space Nuclear Auxiliary Power experiments. The only American reactor to see actual launch and successful operation was the SNAP-10A reactor.
    • Idaho National Lab also developed a so-called "zero-power" unit called the Zero Power Physics Reactor (pronounced "zipper" for short)
    • As part of tests to determine how safe a coolant water would be if a watercooled reactor overheated, the Department of Energy conducted the Boiling water Reactor Experiment. Five such reactors were tested, some to (intentional) destruction to gather data for use in calculating safety margins for commercial reactors in use to this day.
    • Across the Pond, the United Kingdom built the Graphite Low Energy Experimental Pile, a long-lived research reactor and the first purpose-built nuclear reactor in Western Europe.
    • CERN's most famous Tokamak-type fusion reactor is located in Oxfordshire, England, and is known as the Joint European Torus.
    • The first machine to split the atom Down Under was the High Flux Australian Reactor, or HIFAR for short, and today, the Ozzies operate the Open Pool Australian Lightwater reactor, whose initials spell out the name of one of that nation's prized mineral exports.
    • One plant in northernmost San Diego County, California is the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Of note, it is no longer producing power and is being decommissioned, but you don't really want to hear that tune....
    • South Africa too has long done nuclear physics research, and their first foray into the field was the South African Fundamental Atomic Research Installment One, or SAFARI 1 for short.
    • One popular model of nuclear research reactor is called the Training, Research, Isotopes (by) General Atomics (the last two words being the name of the company that designed it).
    • Austria developed a research-reactor and named it Adaptierter Schwimmbecken-Typ-Reaktor Austria (translated into English approximately as: Adapted Swimmingpool-Type Reactor Austria)
    • One of the proposed designs for a next-generation fission reactor that's generated a lot of interest is the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor or LFTR (pronounced "lifter") for short. That acronym was popularized by nuclear engineer Kirk Sorensen.
    • While there is an official report on the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, its veracity is, to be polite, widely challenged from commentators on all sides of the debate. The findings of the study released by Western sources in an effort to "shed more light" on the incident is almost universally known by the informal abbreviation, The Other Report on Chernobyl.
    • There is currently a new fusion research reactor under construction in the south-east of France called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. (Iter is Latin for 'The Way' as in, the way forward.)
• DDT: The debugger on the CP/M Z80 microprocessor platform was called DDT, Dynamic Debugging Tool. This acronym goes all the way back to DEC's PDP-1 computer with its DEC Debugging Tape, based on the FLexowriter Interrogation Tape debugger for MIT's one-of-a-kind TX-0 computer.
  Confusion between DDT-10 and another well-known pesticide, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (C₁₄H₉Cl₅), should be minimal since each attacks a different, and apparently mutually exclusive, class of bugs.
• ELF, the Executable and Linkable Format, a common standard file format for executables, object code, shared libraries, and core dumps.
  • Which was created along with its debugging data format called DWARF, Debugging With Attributed Record Formats.
  • Bonus point for DWARF being an actual backronym. At first it was simply named that way because it sounded cool with a format named ELF.
• The British Government's emergency committee, convened in cases of regional, national or international emergency and the doings of which are highly classified, is generally referred to in the press and by the public as COBRA. Most feel makes up for the fact that it actually stands for the thoroughly prosaic Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, and it has previously been suggested that the words 'Cabinet Office' were added to the acronym to make it more, in the words of The Other Wiki, 'virile'. And possibly to prevent the acronym in question from spelling BRA.
• JAP: The slur acronym for and one of the stereotypes of Jewish women, Jewish American Princess.
  • Also, the acronyms for Java Anon Proxy (a.k.a. Java Anonymous Proxy or Jon Donym) a proxy system designed to allow browsing the Web with revocable pseudonymity (a state of disguised identity), the Journal of Applied Physics, a scientific journal published by American Institute of Physics, the Journal of Applied Physiology, a scientific journal published by American Physiological Society, and Just Another Pumpkin, a dark green pumpkin with small to medium-sized, light yellow splotches and spots on its skin.
  • And the British engine manufacturers J. A. Prestwich, thanks to whom many motorcycles had JAP engines long before the Japanese motorcycle industry got going.
• The motto of the state of Austria is perhaps the most ambitious of all: A.E.I.O.U, which stands either for Latin Austriae est imperare orbi universo (Austria shall rule the whole orb, i.e. Earth) or German Alles Erdreich ist Oesterreich Untertan (All the world is subdued to Austria). It may be well that all of these (and there are many more) are Epileptic Trees; AEIOU was the motto of emperor Friedrich III, but he never gave a definition. In other words, he said AEIOU, but he didn't say why.
• The World Health Organization is a rather high-profile example.
• The name of the central command of NATO military forces? Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. Seriously.
• The term "Special Weapons And Tactics" worked out very well for the public image of SWAT teams. Well enough that they could ignore the fact that, by standard acronym rules, it really ought to have been SWT. SWAT originally stood for Special Weapons Assault Team, but this acronym was rejected by higher-ups in the Los Angeles Police Department for sounding too military. Referring to a police squad as an "assault team" was considered to give the wrong impression, even though that's exactly what SWAT teams are.
  • The Mexican version of the SWAT teams is named GATES (Grupo de Armas y Tacticas ESpeciales/Special Weapons And Tactics Group)
  • The Japanese equivalents of the SWAT teams are named SIT (Special Investigation Team) and SAT (Special Assault Team).
  • The Brazil version of the civil police tactics team is CORE (Coordenadoria de Recursos Especiais, Portuguese for Coordination of Special Assets)
• Souvenir And Novelty Trade Association.
• Subversion: During the Cold War, the US kept an airborne command center ready to take off with the President at moment's notice in the event of a Global Thermonuclear War. This National Emergency Airborne Command Post had the unpronounceable acronym NEACP, but quickly became unofficially known as 'Kneecap'...
  • Less humorously and more meaningfully known by its nickname: "the Doomsday plane".
  • NEACP replaced the 1960s version, which was essentially the same equipment, plus a substantial amount of bulk, mounted in a modified aircraft carrier, called the National Emergency Command Post Afloat.
• As readers of Eric Flint's 1632 novels well know, the 17th-century King Gustav Adolf II of Sweden frequently disguised himself as a commoner to live and work among his people, using the name "Gars": Gustavus Adolphus, Rex Sueciae (Latin for Gustav Adolf, King of the Swedes). Which makes Gustavus Adolphus GAR before GAR became a meme.
• And this entry could not be complete without the U.S. Navy's Commander In Chief - United States Fleet (C.In.C.U.S., which sounds like "sink us"). The position's name was changed to ComInCH almost immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
• The names for the Jeep and the Humvee are thought to be a pronunciation of GP (General Purpose) and HMMWV (High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle). (The British Forces slang term "Gimpy" (pronounced 'jimpy') is known to be a pronunciation of GPMG (General Purpose Machine Gun), so this makes some sense).
  • Same goes for the DShK 1938 "Dushka"^note "Sweetheart", a Soviet heavy machinegun.
  • Patriot Missiles have the Radio Logic Routing Interface Unit (pronounced ROO-LE-ROO) and Switch Multiplexor Unit (pronounced Schmoo) try telling your fellow (non-air defense) soldiers that the RLRIU is up but the SMU is down....
• At one point, the teachers of the First United Methodist Church of Grand Rapids' senior-high sunday-school class had briefly considered the name Senior High Instruction Team. They wisely decided against adopting the moniker.
• A similar use comes from the a joke regarding the naming of the University of Central Florida, suggesting that at one point—alternately when originally naming the school, or when renaming it from its original name of Florida Technological University—they considered Florida University-Cape Kennedy.
• Washington Air National Guard detachment. Funnier in that it wasn't actually spelled out; you just had to guess by context what sort of WANG you were calling for.
  • WAashington Army National Guard doesn't have it much better.
• Province of Ontario Land Registration Information System
• The LAPD has a section called the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.
  • The original name was Total Resources Against Street Hoodlums. It was changed due to activists stating that the name was demeaning.
• There's a collegiate honor society called Sigma Tau Delta.
• Then there's Glucose Oxidase, quite possibly the most sacred enzyme of all time.
• Dublin has a light rail system called Dublin Area Rapid Transit. - DART
  • Dallasites also have a transit system known as DART: Dallas Area Rapid Transit. The governing body of which, of course, is the DART Board.
    • Followed by many jokes in Dallas regarding the name of the transit system in twin-rival-city Fort Worth.^note It's called the Fort Worth Transportation Authority, or simply The T, for those not toilet-humor-minded.
  • The Metro Transit system in King County, WA also has Dial A Ride Transit. Which could also stand for Disabled Access Rapid Transit.
• In a very similar vein, the San Francisco Bay Area has an intercity regional transit system called the Bay Area Rapid Transit- BART. As with Dallas and Fort Worth, cracks about a hypothetical system in nearby Fresno are common.
  • When it began operation in the early 1970s and was still working the kinks out, "Bay Area Rapid Failure" was offered by some as an alternate name.
• Those of us a little more north will be getting the Sonoma-Marin Area Rapid Transit line - the SMART line as an extension of BART (running from Cloverdale to San Francisco).
  • And every kid in the western U.S. jokes about what it'd be called if it started in Fullerton, Felton, Fresno, etc. Supposedly, a Fairfield Area Rapid Transit once existed.
    • And speaking of Fairfield (still in California), the city's main bus service which also serves next door Suisun City is called Fairfield And Suisun Transit- FAST.
  • Their prayers are answered. The local transport company of Ticino canton, Switzerland, is Ferrovie Autolinee Regionale Ticinese. Linky - check the bit at the bottom. ^note  And yes, they are aware of it, and find it absolutely freaking hilarious!
  • The buses in the suburbs of Detroit are run by the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation.
• A lot of cities with light rail go out of their way to create acronyms like that. Portland Oregon has MAX (Metro Area eXpress), Atlanta has MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority)^note which further lends itself to the sarcastic "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta" because of low numbers of ridership among whites, especially outside of rush hour, and so on.
  • When Atlanta was awarded hosting-rights for the 1994 Super Bowl and the '96 Olympics, they turned to some software engineering students at their hometown university, Georgia Tech, to develop a system that could monitor traffic-flow in real-time and provide continuous, adaptive adjustment of traffic-light timing patterns to help prevent traffic backups. The resulting computer program was christened, "Traffic Event Response & Management for Intelligent Navigation Using Signals", which appropriately enough, spells out the city's original name it was founded under, Terminus, a reference to its role as a transfer point between trains on a route connecting Savannah with Chattanooga.
• Averted in Charlotte, where the light rail system, LYNX, isn't really an acronym so much as a homophone pun (as it "links" parts of the city together), though it does fit the theme established by its "parent", the Charlotte Area Transit System.^note The "Lynx" name also fit the "big cats" theme of the city's two main professional sports teams at the time—the Carolina Panthers and Charlotte Bobcats (the latter having since been renamed the Hornets). Adding to the "big cats" theme: the binomial name of the bobcat is Lynx rufus.
• Seattle had the South Lake Union Trolley. When they realized what it spelled the name was officially changed to South Lake Union Streetcar, but the original name stuck.
• Nuremberg, Germany has RUBIN: Realisierung einer automatisierten U-Bahn In Nürnberg. (Realizing an automated subway in Nuremberg)
• Toledo, Ohio has TARTA (Toledo Area Rapid Transit Authority)
• Until the late 1990s/early 2000s, the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan had a bus system called GRATA which stood for Grand Rapids Area Transit Authority. Sadly, rides weren't gratis (Indonesian for free) on GRATA and they changed their name to "the Rapid" in the early '00s.
  • The Rapid has since adopted other acronyms, one of which was Downtown Area Shuttle.
• Michigan's capital city Lansing has CATA—Capital Area Transportation Authority. Its logo is the silhouette of a big cat◊.
• The city of San Luis Obispo, CA has been known to have fun with its name with lines like "Live life in the SLO lane" and "Take it SLO." Their bus system is called SLO Transit.
• Pottstown, Pennsylvania's public bus system used to be called simply Pottstown Urban Transit, but recent upgrades have resulted in it now being called Pottstown Area Rapid Transit — along with the slogan "take PART." (Connections are available to SEPTA — SouthEast Pennsylvania Transit Authority, serving the greater Philadelphia area and surrounding suburbs.)
• A rather funny example, the St. Charles Area Transit, and the Sarasota County Area Transit. Yes. Really.
• Dun and Bradstreet's system for providing a unique serial number for businesses is known as the Data Universal Numbering System.
• The Plain Language Association International (PLAIn) is an organization whose goal is to ease back on the use of obscure Technobabble in academia, government, law and business. (You know... Like unnecessary, opaque acronyms.)
• From 1978 through The '80s, Subaru sold a car-based 4x4 pickup called the "Brat". At first they insisted it was a " Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter". Wags described it as Barely Recognizeable As a Truck.
  • Similarly, the first FIAT (Fabrica Italiana Automobili Torino) cars brought to the U.S. had a bad reputation, to say the least and were quickly given the backronym Fix It Again Tony.
• Jimmy Carter's effort to encourage rationing of gasoline during the oil shortage of the 70s was called the Moral Equivalent of War, a phrase taken from William Jennings Bryan. Unfortunately, when made an acronym on buttons, it spells out MEOW.
• The German Military Counterintelligence Agency is called Militärischer Abschirmdienst.
  • German MAD suggested several times that they renamed the organization to avoid confusion. They also made some suggestions for the new name which were this trope, like MÜD (German for tired), DUMM, WURST and BANANAS (can't remember the details).
• The identical acronym for the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction is usually considered quite appropriate.
  • Also its opposite, Nuclear Utilization Target Selection, NUTS. Hence a common question among IR students: Are you MAD or NUTS?
• G.I.R.L.: Guy In Real Life
• Light Anti-tank Weapon.
  • Then there is the Squad Automatic Weapon.
    • A MythBusters episode had the Build Team use various firearms, including the SAW, to test if it's possible to cut a tree down with bullets. Tory, while discussing the weapons, noted "How ironic" when he got to the SAW.
  • The Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle, in both Light (5.56) and Heavy (7.62) versions.
  • The Missile d´Infanterie Léger ANtichar, a French anti-tank missile. "Milan" means "kite" (like the bird) in French.
  • And for an odd case, everyone knows RPG stands for Rocket Propelled Grenade (except when it doesn't). Except it doesn't. It actually stands for ruchnoy protivotankovy granatomyot, Russian for "handheld antitank grenade launcher".
• High Explosive Anti-Tank Warhead.
  • There's also High Explosive Armour Piercing, or H.E.A.P., High Explosive Squash Head, or H.E.S.H.... there's tons.
  • Worth mentioning is the MOAB, or the Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb, at one point the most powerful non-nuclear weapon ever designed, and colloquially known as the Mother Of All Bombs.
    • Unfortunately subverted though with the Armor-Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding Sabot which is the primary antitank munition for the US Military...so people just nicknamed it "The Silver Bullet".
  • You cannot leave any discussion of silly-sounding military acronyms without mentioning the one describing the FIM-92 Stinger and its class of weapons: M.A.N.P.A.D.S., or Man Portable Air Defense System. It may be something all low-flying combat aircraft fear, but that doesn't stop it from sounding like underwear liners for guys.
  • The British L6 recoilless rifle was better known as the Weapon Of Magnesium, Battalion Anti-Tank.
  • And, of course, there's the Tube-launched Optically-tracked Wire-guided missile, which tows a wire from the launcher behind itself for guidance.
  • The Australian military uses a multipurpose eating tool, combining a spoon, a can opener and a bottle opener, officially titled Field Ration Eating Device. Of course, the grunts have replaced the first two words with "F'ing Ridiculous" ...
  • The Martel is actually a contraction of Missile, Anti-Radiation, Television. It also falls under Meaningful Name as "martel" also means "hammer" in French.
• At at least one university, the orientation program for Hillel, the Jewish student organization, was called First Year Students at Hillel. Ironic, given how the fish as a symbol is strongly associated with Christianity.
  • Never heard of Gefilte Fish?
  • The Christian fish symbol is actually an example of this trope as well. In Greek, the phrase "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior", gives the acronym ΙΧΘΥΣ (Ikthyus), which means "Fish". It was originally used as a code name to help Christians avoid Roman persecution, which means that Fun with Acronyms used to be Serious Business!
• In the wake of their draconian antipiracy efforts, which have included lawsuits for outrageous amounts based on little to no evidence of any wrongdoing with extortionate "settlement terms", the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America gained the less than complementary collective nickname Music And Film Industry Association of America — MAFIAA.
• I DARE you to find somebody who actually knows what that acronym stands for. Yes, there's an answer. It's Drug Abuse Resistance Education.
  • In Australia it's Drugs Are Really Exciting.
  • The aforementioned Schools Heightened Aversion Drugs Therapy of Brass Eye is probably a parody.
• The unmanned surveillance crew at an Air Force base which shall remain unnamed suggested Predator Exploitation Near-real-time Information System for their sub-unit. This was rejected, as was their second choice Predator Observation Station.
• While EPCOT stands for the relatively boring "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" it carries another meaning for Disney employees: Every Paycheck Comes on Thursday.
  • To guests touring late into the evening, on the other hand, it's Every Person Comes Out Tired.
    • It can also mean Every Pocket Cleaned Out Thoroughly.
    • To guests staying for the New Years Eve party (Or make use of Boozing 'round the world) it's Trashed instead of Tired.
    • Evil Polyester Costumes of Terror!
  • Residents of Anaheim, California like to use Disney Is So Not Ever Yielding, to reference the stranglehold the company holds over local politics. Disney would like you to know that Orange County would be nothing without them! No acronym there... they just want you to know.
  • Technically "EPCOT" (all caps) only refers to Walt Disney's original plan for what ultimately became the Walt Disney World Resort. Disney intended the property to be an actual community, with homes and schools and everything, that would serve as a testing ground and a showcase for new technologies and new methods of urban planning. But the company chickened out after Walt Disney died and just decided to turn the property into a collection of theme parks. The theme park "Epcot" was intended to embody the spirit of Walt's EPCOT concept without the political/logistical headaches of governing a town (and with the "new methods of urban planning" changed to "showcase for international cultures"), but it's gradually drifted away from that purpose over the years and most guests don't even know that it was originally an acronym.
  • At the World Showcase, Epcot visitors can participate in a Phineas and Ferb-themed activity called "Agent P's Adventure", where they track down Dr. Doofenshmirtz and thwart his schemes with the help of their Field Operative Notification Equipment, or F.O.N.E. (i.e. using a phone loaned from the park or a downloadable smart-phone app).
• Northern California has the Anderson-Cottonwood Irrigation District.
• There is an organisation named Better Environmentally Sound Transportation, whose first major act was to hold a contest: the BEST Commuter Challenge.
• Countdown's computer is called Cecil, which turns out to mean Countdown's Electronic Calculator In Leeds (where the show is filmed).
• Bikers Against Drunk Drivers.
  • I raise you Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
    • I call and raise Students Against Destructive Decisions (the "DD" originally stood for Driving Drunk).
    • And also parodied (Was it Bill Engvall or Jeff Foxworthy? Think Foxworthy): Drunks Against Mad Mothers.
    • Recording Artists, Actors, and Athletes Against Drunk Driving is merely RAADD.
• The Personal Halting And Stimulation Response rifle. Sure, it just temporarily blinds its targets, but what red-blooded American soldier doesn't secretly yearn to have a PHASeR rifle?
  • Not to mention the TASER, an acronym of Thomas A Swift's Eletric Rifle. Nevermind that Tom Swift was never given a middle name, let alone the initial "A". It makes the acronym work.
• There is a parody Christian conservative group entitled Society of Christians for the Restoration of Old Testament Morality.
• In the Netherlands, there was the Katholieke Universiteit (catholic university) of Tilburg (a city). Unfortunately, the letters K-U-T are the Dutch equivalent of Country Matters. Eventually the university was renamed to KUB (standing for Brabant, the province Tilburg is in).
• NASA, like many American federal agencies, is practically made of this trope. For example, there's a flight control position known as SPARTAN. The "N" stands for "coNtrol."
  • Following a poll on their site to decide what to name the new ISS module ending up with the name "Colbert" winning (through write-in votes, no less), NASA instead chose to name a new zero-g exercise machine for use on the ISS the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill.
  • There's more than just SPARTAN. Witness:
    • Electrical Generation and Integrated Lighting Systems Engineer, responsible for the shuttle's electrical systems.
    • Flight Dynamics Officer, responsible for the flight path of the shuttle, pronounced FIDO.
    • Mechanical, Maintenance, Arm, and Crew Systems, responsible for the shuttle's mechanical systems. (Sound it out.)
  • The ISS gets in on the action, too:
    • Onboard, Data, Interfaces and Networks, responsible for communications systems.
    • Power, Heating, Articulation, Lighting Control Officer, responsible for the station's electrical systems.
    • Thermal Operations and Resources, responsible for maintaining the station's heat radiators.
    • During slow days, the last three are collected with some other stations under the monikers Atmosphere, Thermal, Lighting and Articulation Specialist, and Telemetry, Information Transfer, and Attitude Navigation.
    • NASA has a Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office. Its official initialism is C3PO, like that robot from Star Wars. It manages Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS.
  • One bad taste joke after the Columbia and Challenger disasters was that NASA stood for Need Another Seven Astronauts.
    • In a similar vein, after the Apollo 1 fire, some reporters commented that NASA, which hadn't been very helpful during the investigation of the incident, stood for Never A Straight Answer.
  • NASA once launched a probe to study the planet Mercury called the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging orbiter, or MESSENGER. Appropriate for the planet named for the messenger of the gods.
  • Scientific instruments on board NASA's space probes have their share too. To name just a few:
    • PEPSSI (Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation) and LORRI (LOng-Range Reconnaissance Imager), onboard New Horizons.
    • CAPS (CAssini Plasma Spectrometer), carried by Cassini.
    • GRaND (Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector), on Dawn.
    • LOLA^note Spanish given name (Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter) and CRaTER (Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation), onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
    • Last but not least, JADE (Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment) and JEDI (Jupiter Energetic-particle Detector Instrument) used by Juno.
  • NASA are testing SPHERES aboard the ISS. What are these SPHERES? Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites. They're roughly-spherical mini-satellites that will be used for "testing techniques that could lead to advancements in automated dockings, satellite servicing, spacecraft assembly and emergency repairs".
  • There is a concept for a space exploration vehicle known as the Non-Atmospheric Universal Transport Intended for Lengthy United States Exploration (NAUTILUS-X).
  • An unfortunate one: NASA Education Resources Director.
• The US agency responible for monitiering ocean conditions is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administraion, pronounced Noah.
  • Their space weather satellite, Deep Space Climate Observatory
• The Japanese space agency (JAXA), has a few backronyms of their own, such as the cancelled Japanese space shuttle "HOPE" (H-II^note H-II being the name of the rocket Orbiting PlanE), and a solar sail demonstrator known as the Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun.
• More bad taste — MUNICH: Manchester United Never Intended Coming Home.
  • A common joke during the Waco siege (which descended into bad taste territory following the fiery finale) was that Waco stood for We Ain't Coming Out.
  • And an intercultural bad joke: in Spanish, NBA is said to stand for Negros Bastante Altos, "Quite Tall Black Men". Please note that in Spanish "negro" is not an insult by default.
    • In the same way, in Mexican Spanish, FBI is said to stand for Fuerza Bruta Indígena (Indigenous Brute Force)
• There are two main hypotheses for how Dark Matter works- Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or Massive Compact Halo Objects. WIMPs and MACHOs, anyone?
  • Somehow, it'd be funnier if it was Natural instead of Massive.
  • Bill Bryson suggested that for now, we use the term Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere.
  • Robust Associations of Massive Baryonic Objects
  • A person critical of the theory proposed to call it Fabricated Ad hoc Inventions Repeatedly Invoked in Efforts to Defend Untenable Scientific Theories.
  • On a related note, string theory and other attempts at "theories of everything" meant to explain all of physics in a simple, intuitive way are known as Grand Unified Theories.
• There are persistent rumors that the US Military was, at one stage, developing the Off Radar Ground Attack Standoff Missile until someone mysteriously decided to rename the program. Of course this may just be someone's idea of a joke.
  • Highspeed Anti Radar Missile is real, though.
    • That model's British equivalent is officially known as Air Launched Anti Radar Missile.
• The Free/Libre/Open Source Software community seems to be quite fond of this one:
  • GNU's Not Unix being the most obvious example. (It refers to the fact that GNU intends to be similar to Unix, but contains no code from Unix.) The G is not silent, partially because of the project's stance that it's more fun to say, and partially to avoid sounding like one is talking about the "new operating system" or "new software" (which doesn't apply to GNU, since it dates back to The '80s).
  • Or there's the slightly unfortunate GNU Image Manipulation Program, which, as the name states, is a sub-project of the previously mentioned GNU.
  • Another GNU project, with a less unfortunate (but still odd) name, the GNU Network Object Model Environment, or GNOME, a graphical user interface designed for GNU but usable on practically any OS similar to or based on Unix (such as BSD and Solaris).
  • GNU CCCP is the C-Compatible Compiler Preprocessor. Because the Russian abbreviation for USSR (СССР) looks like "CCCP" to those whose native language uses the Latin alphabet, one might suspect that GNU is communist.
  • A simple recursive acronym wasn't silly enough for the GNU kernel: it has a pair of mutually recursive acronyms — and a bad pun. It's called the GNU HURD (HIRD of Unix Replacing Daemons, where HIRD stands for HURD of Interfaces Representing Depth).
  • Samba isn't an acronym but comes very close - it was the first English word containing the letters S, M and B (in that order) - SMB^note Server Messaging Block being the protocol Samba interoperates with.
  • Wine Is Not an Emulator — and it really isn't (except in the most general sense of trying to behave like something else); it's a compatibility layer for running Windows applications on other operating systems, not unlike what 64-bit versions of Windows have for 32-bit Windows programs or early versions of Mac OS X had for Mac OS Classic programs.
  • LAME originally stood for Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder because it was originally a set of patches for MPEG's dist10 software rather than an encoder in its own right. Its name was rendered inaccurate when the software was retooled into a proper MP3 codec.
  • Linux, though actually a portmanteau of "Linus"(Torvalds)+"UNIX", has sometimes often been given the joke recursive-acronym interpretation "Linux Is Not UNIX".
  • The standard FLOSS server bundle is known as... LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (or Perl).
  • The name of the Emacs clone FINE stands for Fine Is Not EMacs.
  • Once there was Emacs. The prototype Lisp machine had an Emacs-like editor called EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs). The Symbolics Lisp machine editor was called ZWEI (ZWEI Was EINE Initially). Fortunately, we were saved from DREI (DREI is Really Emacs Inside).
  • The Amnesic Incognito Live System (a privacy tool)
  • Ionization FRont Interactive Tool (3D data visualizer, now generic, but originally for stellar fireworks and named appropriately)
  • XINU, an embedded operating system, stands for XINU Is Not UNIX. It was originally developed around the same time as GNU and has a similar lack of UNIX code.
  • The Free Lossless Audio Codec, or FLAC, earned its name partially because it's been royalty-free since the beginning, and partially because the software the developers provide for using and implementing the format is available under FLOSS licenses.
• Palestinian organization Ḥarakat al-Taḥrīr al-Waṭanī al-Filasṭīnī (Palestnian National Liberation Movement) is known as FATAH or 'victory' because HATAF would mean 'sudden death'.
  • Simlarly HAMAS means "zeal" and stands for Ḥarakat al-Muqawamah al-ISlamiyyah (the Islamic Resistance Movement).
    • Hamas also means "violence" in Hebrew, something the Israelis are quite fond of pointing out (despite the fact that the two aren't spelled the same way.)
• The French and Germans developed a missile called Haut subsonique Optiquement Téléguidé (High Subsonic Optical Guided). It can carry a HEAT warhead.
• From World War II we have Pipe Line Under The Ocean or PLUTO
  • Which lays itself open backronym suspicion because normally people don't consider the English Channel an ocean.
  • In Germany there was the ironic acryonm "Gröfaz" (sometimes spelled "GröFaZ) for Hitler, lampooning the propaganda of the Nazis - Größter Feldherr aller Zeiten, "greatest commander-in-chief of all times'''.
• There's apparently a computer-based analysis tool for Nonnumerical, Unstructured Data Indexing, Searching, and Theorizing. In what is probably an attempt to not look too crude, the official acronym used by research papers throws in an asterisk in the middle to be NUD*IST...
• Richard Nixon's re-election campaign was styled the Committee to Re-Elect the President, meant to be initialized as CRP, but after the Watergate scandal broke, people deemed another interpretation to be more apt.
  • Parodied by MAD as the Committee to Reelect the American President.
  • And by Marvel Comics with the Committee to Regain America's Principles.
  • And by the late Kenny Everett in his repeating Dallas / Dynasty parody Dallasty; the last episode of such in each show ended with "credits" which were of course absurdly long and scrolled past far too rapidly to read, and at the very end said (for a second or two) "Creative Research Associates Production" — stacked vertically so that the "CRAP" lined up and could clearly be read as such.
• The gene "Zbtb7" was formerly known as the "POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic factor", which was often shortened to Pokémon. Pokémon USA naturally threatened to sue, as they didn't want Pokémon to be associated with the gene that may be the trigger for cancer, of all things.
• Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, happens to be seasonally- dependent classical depression. Who says shrinks don't have a sense of humor?
  • Or S.O.S.A.D, which would be Sudden Onset Seasonal Affective Disorder. And it is SO SAD.
  • Then there's the Standard American Diet...
  • Not to mention Singles Awareness Day, also known as Valentine's Day.
  • Sad and coincidental, but Social Anxiety Disorder's (AKA social phobia) acronym spells out SAD, and many people with the disorder to tend to be sad because of the way it mixes with their life.
• Intermittent Explosive Disorder is the official name given to a disorder which causes instances of Berserk Button to overlap with destructive results. It also happens to share an acronym with Improvised Explosive Devices, roadside bombs that are well known because of their use in The War on Terror.
• The Scotland Yard computer system is the Home Office Linked Major Enquiry System.
• In a 2007 paper in Chemical Communications, a group of Chinese academics coined an extremely unfortunate acronym for copper (Cu) nanotubes. The same paper also had bismuth nanotubes. Their journal article on the work managed to get published in an English-language journal with their nomenclature intact. This is possibly the only time a Chem. Comm. article has been cited by Viz.
• UKTV renamed UKTV Gold to G.O.L.D., which stood for Go On, Laugh Daily, in 2008, before changing it to just Gold two years later.
• There is always the Office of Naval Intelligence.
  • Although at first glance this appears to be an Oxymoron, it gets funnier if you know that an "Oni" is a Japanese ogre known for wielding giant iron clubs.
• The name of the USA PATRIOT Act stood for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act". The act's primary effect was to increase the government's wiretap and surveillance powers.
  • Richard Stallman repurposed the acronym as the U SAP AT RIOT Act.
  • The government's been doing this a lot lately. Since then we've had the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act of 2007 and the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act of 2010 (though the latter didn't pass the Senate).
  • This Economist blog post contains a list of American laws that have Fun with Acronyms. AYUDA, anyone?
  • On a local level, Erie County, New York introduced the Prevention of Emotional Neglect and Child Endangerment Act to ban the use of conversion therapy on minors, an obvious Take That! to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who has voiced support for the practice.
• The Fisherman's Information Bureau. "It was this big! Really!"
• The United States and Canada jointly operate the Free And Secure Trade program for approved commercial drivers to receive faster and cheaper importation clearance for eligible goods being driven into either country.
• Someone at the government was having fun when they came up with the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (a continuation of health care benefits after you lose your job). That, or it's proof of government infestation by terrorists with hoods and metal masks...
• The name of the party supply company brand Elope stands for "Everybody's Laughing On Planet Earth."
• The unfortunately named Florida Association of Public Procurement Officials, or FAPPO.
• In 2000, when the Reform Party of Canada merged with a faction of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, the new party (the Canadian Alliance) came very close to calling itself the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance. However, the media added Party to the name, causing the party to change the arrangement of the words.
• In the Netherlands, schools and universities are sometimes associated with religious organisations. Universities also tend to turn their names into acronyms (like U.v.A.: Universiteit van Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam). Cue hilarity when the Catholic University in Tilburg (Katholieke Universiteit Tilburg) rapidly changed its name to Catholic University of Brabant. Take a guess what the less-than-flattering name for female genitalia is in Dutch?
  • Likewise, Belgium has the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, which gets shortened to KULeuven, and not KUL. Because kul is Dutch for nonsense.
• The unsucessful landing craft from the European Space Agency's Mars Explorer was called Beagle, and one of the Beagle's tools was the Payload Adjustable Workbench.
• Britain has the National Union of Teachers.
  • There's also the British Association of Plastic Surgeons, or BAPS. ^note Figure it out yourself.
• That Bring A Real Friend poster on Totally Radical? That's a real-life version of both that trope and this one.
• In military aviation, there is HERO—this stands for Hazards of Electromagnetic Radiation to Ordnance. (A strong enough radio signal can cause detonators to spontaneously fire. HERO restricts the use of radio devices.
• The US military tried their hardest to subvert this trope with the DUKW, an amphibious truck of outstanding quality produced in WWII. D for designed in 1942 [of course!], U for utility, K for all-wheel drive and W for dual-axle. Everyone ignored the inconvenient W and called them "ducks".
• This works out awesomely for the Cleveland Institute of Art, or CIA.
  • This also works for the Culinary Institute of America.
  • And the Canadian Iinstitute of Actuaries
  • At the University of California, Berkeley, there is a student organization that used to be called the California Investment Association. In 2009, they changed their name to Berkeley Investment Group.
• The Defense Research and Engineering Network. (Hint: Read it backwards.)
  • Unless you're a Farscape fan, in which case...
• While not technically an acronym, the Canadian postal code ^note Postal codes always follow the pattern of Letter-Number-Letter Number-Letter-Number for Santa Claus is indeed H0H 0H0. ^note Due to how postal codes work, there's no danger of anyone else getting it: the first zero indicates a rural delivery zone, yet the first H designates Montreal, the second-largest city in Canada. The only other H0- code in use is H0M, used by the Akwesasne tribal reserve, which is on the Canada-U.S. border and more than 100 km away from Montreal.
• The Food Stamp Program, a federal aid program administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (as well as the largest nutrition assistance program), changed its name to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or in abbreviated terms, SNAP!
• The Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines probably elicits a few snickers among foreign policy wonks who have seen American Pie...
  • While we're in the Philippines, the Katipunan revolutionary organization's full name is Kataastaasang Kagalang-galang na Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan ^note Supreme and Most Honorable Society of the Children of the Nation. Rest assured that a) they're defunct as an organization (having been formed to throw out the Spanish Evil Colonialists in 1896); and b) they're not a racist group or even related to that said group (although their members could get fairly regionalistic and/or classist, but thankfully no white masks and cross burning and the like).
• At Purdue University back in the 1970's, about the time "TGIF" was becoming commonplace, a group of students formed the So Happy It's Thursday club.
• The US Department of Justice gets on with acronym fun with their policing committees, Community Oriented Policing Services, and Police Executive Research Forum
• This trope is actually Older Than Feudalism: Early Christians chose the "fish" symbol based on the initials of Jesus Christ's title (in Greek, the lingua franca of the day): Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter (letters weren't one-to-one with Roman script). The saying "money is the root of all evil" came from the same source (as "greed") as a thinly veiled Take That! against the Roman Empire, in Latin: Radix Omnium Malorum Avaritia.
• SAFE Archery, a company that specializes in archery with foam-tipped arrows, for special events and the like. They were used by Disney for Brave themed archery activities, for example. The name stands for Students And Famlies Experiencing Archery.
• The sadly now defunct Federation of Australian Race Tuners.
• The full title of London Zoo's biodiversity exhibit, Biodiversity Underpinning Global Survival, home to most of the zoo's invertebrates.
• The London Overground's Gospel Oak to Barking Line (now officially named the Suffragette Line) is much more popularly known as the GOBLIN.
• In 1938 when government programs with unwieldy acronyms were all the rage, O. C. Cash parodied those names by calling his newly formed barbershop quartet club the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA). The Society bylaws always insisted that one should never try to pronounce the initials as a word, but everybody did — for decades it was informally called "Speb-squssa" by its members. Finally they decided that the ridiculously long name joke had gone on long enough, and formally changed the name to Barbershop Harmony Society.
• Meanwhile, down at the South Pole, we have the BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescope.
• Next to the MIT campus is Microsoft's New England Research and Development Center, also known as the Microsoft NERD Center.
  • Another organization that uses the same acronymn is Nintendo European Research & Development.
• And last but not least two nicknames given by USAF personnel to two of its most known planes, that are actually acronyms: BUFF (Big Ugly Fat Fucker^note Bowdlerised as Fellow for the B-52 bomber, and FRED (Fucking^note Bowdlerised as Fantastic or Freaking Ridiculous Economic (or Enviromental) Disaster) for the C-5 Galaxy transport plane.
• FRED is also a nickname given by railroaders for an electronic device used in lieu of a caboose, standing for Flashing Rear End Device. (It's proper name is an End-of-Train Device or EOT.) The device transmits telemetry to a receiver in the cab, colloquially known as a Wilma (Fred's wife on The Flintstones).
• British anti-porn campaigner Mary Whitehouse originally named her campaign to get rude programs banned as Clean Up National TV, but wiser council prevailed.
• Sex therapist and intimacy expert Dr. Laura Berman came up with "VENIS", which stands for Very Erotic Non Insertive Sex. as a clinical term for heavy petting.
• Naming of drug trials are excessively guilty of this, Big Pharma has managed to produce such gems as BATMAN^note Bisphosphonate and Anastrozole Trial - Bone Maintenance Algorithm Assessment, MANTICORE^note Multidisciplinary Approach to Novel Therapies in Cardiology Oncology Research, AWESOME^note Angina With Extremely Serious Operative Mortality Evaluation, BLIND-DATE^note Blinded Withdrawal Of Deprenyl In The Datatop Extension Trial and SMART-CURE^note Cohort Study in Uganda Comparing Artesunate + Amiodaquine (Coarsucam) Versus Artemether + Lumenfantrine (Coartem) in the Treatment of Repeated Uncomplicated Plasmodium Falciparum Malaria Attacks; the fact that the acronym and the full title of the drug trial do not match at all was not addressed in the scientific article. Most of this have to do with needing a name that will easily roll off the tongues of Drugs Sales Reps, the majority of whom probably did not take science or biology in college. Also, by giving a drug trial a positive sounding name, it gives doctors the subconscious impression that the trial produced a positive result, even if the actual data says otherwise.
• The name of one Argentine political party, the Frente Argentino Progresista has certainly not gone unnoticed in the internet.
  • The German FAP (Freiheitliche [Deutsche] (Yes, without the "Deutsche" in their acronym.) Arbeiter Partei) a now defunct neo-Nazi group in Germany that’s long forgotten by history after being outlawed as too fascist, did not go unnoticed either — fittingly as fanart on the site who coined the term "fap".
• When someone gets a sprain or similar injury, doctors recommend the RICE protocol (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation).
• According to former astronaut Michael Collins in his book Liftoff, NASA's first abort sensing system was named the Abort Sensing and Implementation System (ASIS) because the Air Force was "not happy about calling it ASS."
• Japan was the first country to have a HDTV system, Hi-Vision, over two decades before the world finally caught up. It's video system was called MUSE, or Multiple sub-Nyquist Sampling Encoding[1]. Wait, it gets better: The video system was paired with an audio system called Digital Audio Near-instantaneous Compression and Expansion, or DANCE. Apparently the engineers who worked on the system were fond of Greek myths...
• After the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals, the US government decided to establish an official body to regulate the accounting industry as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (itself something of an example with the charming name SarbOx). This body was called the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, whose initialism PCAOB doesn't itself stand for anything but is easy to spoonerize into "PCABO", pronounced "peek-a-boo"—an amusing name given its oversight function. Naturally PCAOB employees and other accounting professionals hate the nickname, but this hasn't kept some people from using it (it's particularly common among administrative law experts, as a rather significant case in administrative law respected the PCAOB, which is just fun to call "the Peekaboo case").
• The government body that regulates air pollution in California is called the California Air Resources Board, or CARB.
• The whole field of Genetics IS this trope. One example shall suffice: a longevity gene of Drosophila, I 'm Not Dead Yet, or INDY.
• Likewise the whole field of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. The topper would be INADEQUATE, Incredible Natural Abundance DoublE QUAntum Transfer Experiment.
• Still science: The "BAM explosion test" is an unintended example, since the initials do not stand for the test conditions, but the inventor, the German BundesAnstalt für Materialforschung.
• A new anti armor weapon developed by DARPA carries the name MAgneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition.
• George Mason University wanted to rename its law school in honor of a recently-deceased Supreme Court justice: the Antonin Scalia School of Law. On further consideration of the pronunciation (ASSHOLE), they revised it to A.S. Law School. Made even worse by the fact that the original name change was announced on April 1, leading some to think it was an April Fool's joke. (It wasn't.)
• The Indonesia Convention Exhibition in Tangerang, Banten, Indonesia is the biggest convention and exhibition center in Indonesia. The air-conditioning system in the building feels as if it were cold as ICE.
• When Petco decided to sponsor the San Diego Padres' new stadium (known as Petco Park), they offered fans the opportunity to purchase bricks outside the concourse and dedicate them. PETA, who had a long standing dispute over Petco's treatment of animals, used theirs to call for a boycott of Petco. When it was rejected, they instead submitted a brick reading "Break Open Your Cold Ones Toast The Padres Enjoy This Champion Organization." The Padres accepted it, not because they didn't notice but because they reasoned that only those looking for the acrostic would see it.
• "Laser" is Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. A Laser is often used to read and write CDs and DVDs (like the ones in CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives). Also used in Laserdisc players (for watching Laserdisc movies) and Blu-ray Disc players (as a blue laser is shown reading the BD disc). Often used in weapons by humans at a Laser Quest entertainment complex in Houston, Texas to play Laser Tag (against other people).
  • "Maser" substitutes Microwave for Light. Other variants (sometimes seen in hard science fiction) include the GRASER, which uses Gamma Radiation, and the somewhat odd-looking XASER, which uses X-rays.
• A behavioral school in Houston, Texas is known as Harris County Department of Education - Academic and Behavior Center East (or HCDE - ABC East).
• In entertainment, EGOT is the term for the performers and creators who've won at least one competitive (non-honorary) award at the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Awards ceremonies (the four major awards in the United States).
• Medical gallows humor is full of these:
  • Assuming Room Temperature (dead or nearly so)
  • Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.
  • But Unfortunately Not Dead Yet (sometimes combined with Fucked Up Beyond All Recovery)
  • Cat Owner Smells Made Of Nuts And Used Tampons (Crazy Cat Lady)
  • Felt Awful But Im Alright Now
  • Funny Unusual Rectal Blockage
  • Get Out of My Emergency Room
  • Hypertensive Obese Noncompliant Diabetic Asshole
  • Take (them) Out And Shoot Them
  • Violent Obese Drunk Krazy Alcoholic
  • Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time
• Arizona State University offers a degree in Graphic Information Technology ("git" is a British English insult that doesn't crop up much in American English, so it is possible those responsible for the acronym weren't aware of this.) This has resulted in a student organization putting up some rather amusing posters asking people to "Join the GIT Club."
  • Git is also a popular version control system so this might be where the acronym came from.
• The Polish Armed Forces Branches Operational Command, in Polish: Dowództwo Operacyjne Rodzajów Sił Zbrojnych, or DORSZ (Polish for "cod") in short.
• One principle of software development is known as Don't Repeat Yourself, or DRY. Violations of DRY are called WET, which is taken to mean Write Everything Twice, We Enjoy Typing, or Waste Everyone's Time.
  • Another such principle is Keep It Simple, Stupid.
• There is a a nuclear magnetic resonance imaging technique named Proton-Enhanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy
• When the Republican-dominated Congress held up a budget bill to the point where the government shut down, the National Weather Service branch in Anchorage, Alaska released a weather prediction on their site, with PLEASE PAY US embedded as an acrostic in the first words of each sentence.
• Astrophysicists Matthew Muterspaugh and Maciej Konacki are busy with The Attempt To Observe Outer-planets In Non-single-stellar Environments, or TATOOINE for short.
• Yulon's R&D department is named Hua-chuang Automobile Information Technical Center, or HAITEC for short. Now, try to pronounce the acronym...
• "Jeb", the nickname for George W. Bush's brother John Ellis Bush.
• In the airline industry, all airfares between cities have an alphanumeric fare basis code of 1-8 characters. The first character is usually the booking code (A-Z) and the second character can be a seasonal designation, such as "H" for high or "L" for low. One type of fare that can include tour packages is appropriately called "inclusive tour" and will have "IT" in the fare basis code. There is at least one instance of an airline filing an S-class high season inclusive tour fare. ^note  And quite a few examples of S-class Low season Inclusive Tour fares too!
• A scientific paper dealing with the weird dimming pattern of Star KIC 8462852 (More information in this video) was titled Where's The Flux?" The initials were quite deliberate, as the scientists writing it didn't know what was going on with this star.
• Caboose on mainline trains in North America were replaced by the Flashing Rear End Device. It started off as only a way to mark the end of the train, but now can communicate with a unit at the front of the train, relaying how much pressure is in the brake line in at the end of the train. The receiver? Wilma.
• Many a desktop support person knows the most frequent problem: PEBKAC: Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.
• America's first major Emergency Broadcasting System was called CONELRAD which was a system designed for the COntrol of ELectromagnetic RADiation
• Schools in the United States handle active shooter situations with a protocol called ALICE which means Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate.
• There exists a type of undersea observatory device called a Circulation Obviation Retrofit Kit (CORK). It's deployed onto the openings of boreholes to measure water pressure and temperature.
• Aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan's company Scaled Composites absolutely adored this trope, and used it in naming several of their pieces of prototype and experimental hardware.
  • Their design for a lightweight, low-cost ground-attack figher was named Agile Response Effective Support.
  • Their technology demonstrator for a lightweight, short-field capable transport aircraft for DARPA was internally assigned the name Special Mission Utility Transport. DARPA wasn't amused, and referred to it as the Advanced Technology Tactical Transport or AT³ for short
• In the American Political System, "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) is slang for a relatively moderate Republican politician with socially progressive views. Aside from the obvious meaning, the term is also a pun on "rhino" (as in "rhinoceros"); the American Republican Party's official emblem is an elephant, while a rhinoceros is another large, grey-skinned animal with white horns that resembles an elephant, but isn't one. On the flip side: relatively conservative Democratic politicians are (somewhat less commonly) called "DINOs" (Democrats In Name Only), which also makes for a pun on "dino" (as in "dinosaur"), alluding to the fact that conservative Democrats are generally older than their more left-leaning peers, and are coming to be increasingly viewed as "the old guard" as the party has become more openly progressive.
• Toronto's high speed rail between Union Station and Toronto Pearson International Airport is known as the Union-Pearson Express, or the UP.
• In colloquial English, it's called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. But in Arabic, its many detractors and former unwilling residents call it DA'ISH (from its Arabic name ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī 'l-'Irāq wa ash-Shām). When spoken, Da'ish happens to resemble Daes (one who crushes something underfoot, i.e. a dictator) and Dāhis (one who sows discord). The relative rarity of acronyms in Arabic, and the option to say it with a disparaging long E sound, only further underscores the point.
• There's a gene with the relatively self-explanatory and boring name of Regulatory-associated protein of mTOR. Unfortunately, some killjoys changed the acronym to RPTOR.
• More science-related acronyms here.
• W.A.T.C.H. : World Against Toys Causing Harm, Inc., which has been issuing the annual “10 Worst Toys” list since 1973.
• In the U.S they have a series of statutes that allows criminals to be charged not with specific crimes, but be charged with being members of a criminal organization. Thereby making it easier to prosecute and convict Organized Crime leaders who insulate themselves from prosecution by having their underlings carry out criminal activities. The Statutes are known as:
  • Racketeer
  • Influenced
  • Corrupt
  • Organization
  • Rumor is that this was deliberate by its author as reference to the main character of the film Public Enemy, though he's denied it.
• In Canada, a group that helps with owed child support payments is called:
  • Mothers
  • Against
  • Fathers
  • In
  • Arrears
  • Hilariously lampshaded in the 90's during a debate in the Ontario Legislature over a bill by the then Conservative Government to bring in new penalties for back-payments was supported by the organization, leading one opposition Member to say the bill has Mafia support.
• There was once an all-women's air force group during World War II, and it was called the Women Air Force Service Pilots. For the Army division, it was known as the Women's Army Service Pilots.
• CRIME (Compression Ratio Info-leak Made Easy) is a security exploit against secret web cookies on the Web. And there is a CRIME exploit against HTTP compression called BREACH (short for Browser Reconnaissance and Exfiltration via Adaptive Compression of Hypertext).
• The New England Confectionery Company.
• Spain has the Organización Nacional de Ciegos Españoles, which is pronounced "own-say" like the Spanish word for eleven, and translates to English as National Organization of Blind Spaniards.
• In the UK, there is a mental health service for men called the Campaign Against Living Miserably, or CALM.
• Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice: As the name implies, a subgroup of skinheads who oppose racism and fascism.
• Sharing Electronic Resources and Laws against Organized Crime. SHERLOC.
• Programming Languages
  • Fortran, originally written as FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation).
    • An enhanced compiler from Waterloo University was Waterloo FORTRAN: WATFOR. When an upgrade called FORTRAN IV came, the University kept pace with Waterloo FORTRAN IV: WATFIV.
  • COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language).
  • BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), which drove virtually all microcomputers (e.g., Altair 8800, Apple ][, TRS-80, Commodore 64, IBM Personal Computer^note While MS-DOS was its main operating system, the IBM PC did have BASIC in ROM as a fallback, etc.) in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
  • LISP officially stands for "LISt Processing", but due to the fact that Lisp programs tend to involve absolutely massive amounts of parentheses due to the way the language's syntax works, an old programming joke is that it actually stands for something like "Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses".
  • Subverted with the esoteric programming language, INTERCAL, which stands for "Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym".
• The Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration. The initials spell out the Filipino word for "hope".
• A tradition at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta is the beanie cap given to all freshmen, called the "rat cap". Traditionally, "RAT" is an acronym for Recruit At Tech^note Alternatively, the acronym can stand for Recently Acquired Techie. In the old days, freshmen were required to wear their rat cap at all times (unless Tech beats Georgia in football that year), lest they receive hazing from upperclassmen; however, due to anti-hazing laws, the tradition largely died out by the 1960s. Participation in the rat cap tradition is now completely voluntary, with the marching band still upholding the more light-hearted parts of the tradition, namely the way it is decorated.
• A mysterious light in the skies over Canada, unrelated to the aurora borealis, was nicknamed "Steve" by the Facebook group Alberta Aurora Chasers as a Shout-Out to the 2006 film adaptation of Over the Hedge. It would up becoming an acronym for the official name of the phenomenon, Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.
• REINFORCE learning is a type of Machine Learning introduced in the early 90s. Based on its main equation it stands for REward Increment = Nonnegative Factor times Offset Reinforcement times Characteristic Eligibility.
• The Photic Sneeze Reflex (the reflex that some people have that causes them to sneeze when looking into bright light, among other stimuli) is also known as Autosomal Compelling Helio-Opthalmic Outburst Syndrome, or ACHOO Syndrome
• The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has a portal called Sharing Electronic Resources and Laws On Crime.
• Accurately simulating corrosion of glass is both very important in academia and very hard because of the effect of a lot of factors and interactions. One proposed solution method that incorporated a lot more than its contemporaries is called the Glass Reactivity with Allowance for the Alteration Layer model, with the authors specifically pointing out that 'GRAAL is the French translation for Grail'. Holy Grail of the field or not, it has made some experiments a lot easier.
• The official names for CERN's particle detectors include A Large Ion Collider Experiment, and a smaller facility exploring cloud formation is called Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets. One of the particle decelerator rings is known as the Extra Low Energy Antiproton device.
• The neighborhood of San Francisco south of Market St. is commonly known as the South Of Market Area. Similarly, Seattle has its South Of DOwntown district, which was known as South of the Dome prior to the Kingdome's demolition.
• The observance formerly known as the International Day Against Homophobia, or IDAHO. It's now called the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, which makes it more inclusive but ruins the acronym.
• Boston Area Trans Support, a support group for trans and non-binary people living in or near Boston, Massachusetts. They occasionally use a rather cute bat, rendered in the pink, white and blue colors of the Transgender Pride flag, as a mascot in promotional images.
• "Sabermetrics" has caught on as a popular term for the statistical analysis of baseball, often based on neglected data that talent scouts don't consider when evaluating players' talent. The term is derived from "SABR", the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research, the organization that helped develop it as a field of statistical research.
• The name of the Xbox One X, if you break it down in fourths, can be shortened to X.B.O.X.
• The name of the Centre for Knowledge and Interaction Technologies (CKIT) looks innocent enough,until you realise it's a research centre for Flinders University, making the full acronym FUCKIT.
• There are several examples of words which were initially acronyms but ended up becoming widely considered words in their own right. Examples include "laser" (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation), "scuba" (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus), and "radar" (RAdio Detection And Ranging).
• Worldcat, one of the world's largest online information databases, is run by a nonprofit group called the Online Computer Library Center (or "OCLC" for short). The name is a sly reference to the fact that they started out in 1967 as a group of university libraries based in Ohio, and called themselves the Ohio College Library Center; they changed their name, but kept their acronym the same.
• Swiss train manufacturer Stadler Rail has been getting in the game with their Fast Light Intercity Regional Train (FLIRT), as well as the KISS^note Komfortabler Innovativer Spurtstarker S-Bahn-Zug, meaning Comfortable, Innovative, Sprint-capable Suburban train, WINK^note Wandelbarer Innovativer Nahverkehrs-Kurzzug, meaning convertible, innovative short train for local transport, and SMILE^note Schneller Mehrsystemfähiger Innovativer Leichter Expresszug, meaning speedy multi-system innovative lightweight express train which rely on knowing German to get the names.
• In Hamburg university it's tending in the direction of Overly Long Gag as any computer science student can note: Since Fachbereich Informatik spells out "FBI", a student organisation backronymed themselves to Menge aller fachschaftsinteressierten Aktivisten, a show for first semesters consists of "murdering" a professor and hunting down the "killer", and so on.
• After Dungeons & Dragons allegedly caused the tragic suicide of Irving Pulling (it didn't), concerned parents formed BADD, Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons. Either they were completely serious, or someone in PR has phenomenal self-awareness.
• The National Office of Animal Health, a UK veterinary organisation whose name reflects an early pioneer in looking after animals.
• At the 2020 Singapore Auto Show, Subaru showed off the Subaru "Forester Ultimate Customized Kit Special edition", with the fancy sign outside the display leaving no doubt as to how the acronym for that should be read. Subaru immediately trended on Twitter after the reveal as people debated on whether Subaru's marketing department realized what it had done. (Given the response and attention, it has been generally agreed that they knew exactly what they were doing.)
• The Defending Each and Every Person from False Appearances by Keeping Exploitation Subject to Accountability (DEEPFAKES Accountability) Act of 2019, which seeks to hold people accountable for producing forged audio and video of others.
• The National Association of Stock Car Automobile Racing deserves a mention.
• During a riot at an Atlanta prison, there were significant concerns that the inmates might use the network of tunnels under the complex to attempt escape, ambush law enforcement, or plant bombs. The FBI SWAT teams assigned the difficult and unpleasant task of guarding the tunnels took to calling themselves the Tactical Underground Reconnaissance Detail... and their self-proclaimed mission was to locate and apprehend Subjects Hiding In Tunnels.
• Much fun was had on the Internet when it came to light how some grocery store checkout scanners abbreviate Land O ' Lakes Butter.
• Meteorologists are no strangers to this trope. In the upper atmosphere, powerful lightning strikes cause phenomena known as Transient Luminous Events, most of which are named after members of The Fair Folk:
  • The first of such phenomena to be discovered was red sprites, SPRITE standing for Stratospheric/mesospheric Perturbations Resulting from Intense Thunderstorm Electrification. They appear as groups of vast columns of red lights.
  • ELVES are Emission of Light and Very low frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic pulse Sources. They appear as huge red halos in the ionosphere expanding very quickly (as in, a few miliseconds).
  • More recently, new scientific studies gave us TROLLs (Transient Red Optical Luminous Lineaments) and GhOSTs (Green emissions from excited Oxygen in Sprite Tops).
• One kind of CPU architecture called Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, or EPIC. When code is compiled, the compiler decides which instructions can be run in parallel. The architecture would eventually be used in Intel's Itanium processors, and later fall into obscurity.
• The massive event now known simply as Woodstock had its fair share of cancellations and concerns, with various groups unable to attend in part due to traffic or other issues. One group which really took the cake, though, was Iron Butterfly, who were stuck in LaGuardia Airport. They sent a missive via Western Union demanding to be helicoptered out to the event, whereupon they would perform and be flown back. John Morris, the production coordinator, took exception to this ever so slightly unreasonable demand, and collaborated with a terribly helpful WU operator to send the following reply:
  For reasons I can't go into / Until you are here / Clarifying your situation / Knowing you are having problems / You will have to find / Other transportation / Unless you plan not to come.
• In August 2015, the Washington Post ranked over 300 bills featuring this trope which had been introduced just in the eight months the current Congress had been sitting. They ranged from such awful acronyms as the FOIA Oversight and Implementation Act (which the Post ranked dead last for using the acronym FOIA within itself ^note Normally it stands for Freedom of Information Act) to such gems as the Global Internet Freedom Act, or GIF Act, which ranked number one. Later, Rep. John Yarmuth wrote in to note they had missed his Keep Our Campaigns Honest Act, or KOCH Act (a subtle dig at the Koch Brothers, known for giving large contributions to Republican candidates) which the Post acknowledged would have ranked in the Top 25 had they been aware of it.
• A software tool used by the Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance to classify genetic lineages of SARS-CoV-2 - the virus that causes COVID-19 - is called Phylogenetic Assignment of Named Global Outbreak Lineages. Pangolins were originally thought to be an intermediate host between bats and humans of COVID-19.
• HAWK beacons are sometimes used at pedestrian crossings in the United States as an alternative to standard traffic lights. The acronym stands for High-Intensity Activated Crosswalk.
• Pursuit Intervention Technique (PIT): A pursuit Tactic employed by the police where the pursuing car forces a fleeing car to turn sideways spinning them out of control and forcing them to stop. While only to be employed in certain circumstances and at certain speeds, it has been employed at high speed resulting in flipped over cars causing injury and sadly even death
• The American monthly entertainment magazine Entertainment Weekly, or EW. Their site is located at ew.com.
• Among detractors of non-fungible tokens, NFT stands for "No Fucking Thanks", or "Nasty Fucking Thing".
• Military operations to destroy an enemy's anti-air capabilities are classified as Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses.
• A politician in Bukidnon, Philippines turned his name into a pair of backronyms during his campaign: Keep Our Town In Correct Order and the more religiously-charged Keep Our Trust In Christ Only.
  • Par for the course in Filipino politics, considering the rather self-aggrandizing tendencies of most of them. Case in point Cavite politician Luis "Jon-Jon" Ferrer, who came up with the initialism Let's Join Forces based on his name.
• The Singapore Civil Defence Force has the Fire & Rescue Operations Support Tender, also known as FROST. Its logo even has a depiction of a snowflake in the place of the letter 'O'!
• SpaceX came up with one for a test, launch, or landing (yes, landing) of a rocket that ends with its destruction: Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD).
• White blood cells can project Neutrophil Extracellular Traps (NETs) to kill pathogens.
• A very simple, albeit gaseous example from the Bradford University Role-Play Society.
• Konami has the PASELI digital currency, which stands for Pay Smart Enjoy Life.
• One of the instruments on the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft—launched in 2023 to explore the Galilean satellites of Jupiter and ultimately orbit its largest moon, Ganymede—carries the acronym JANUS. The instrument itself is actually the spacecraft's camera. But its acronym is actually a joke in Latin about the tawdry affairs of the planet's namesake Roman God, Jupiter: Jovis, Amorum ac Natorum Undique Scrutator. Translated to English, that means "comprehensive observation of Jupiter, his love affairs and descendants".
• A common term in investing for the top tech stocks on offer is FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google). With Netflix's decline and Microsoft's rise, the alternative that emerged was MAMAA (Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet).
• The University of Washington's Institute on Human Development and Disability was originally known as the Child Development and Mental Retardation Center, which could be mistaken as Center for Disabled and Mentally Retarded Children.
• Acquired Immune Defficiency Syndrome was previously known by the less politically correct acronym Gay Related Immune Defficiency.
  • Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, a category of drugs that are taken pre-emptively to prevent exposure to certain diseases including HIV, has a very handy abbreviation to remind when to use them.
• Fans of Star Trek: The Original Series would recognize the source of the mining aid equipment Honeywell Ore Retrieval and Tunneling Aid as being named after the Anti-Villain from "The Devil in the Dark". At the end of that episode, the hotra and her children did actually help the mining effort on the planet, making the specific use of this equipment match the source of the name.

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